Chinese trade
Has the cold US-Sino trade war just got piping hot?
One of the go-to guys on trade litigation between the US and China is Bill Perry, a Seattle-based attorney who spent the 80s at the US International Trade Commission, the Office of Chief Counsel and Office of Antidumping Investigations, and the US Department of Commerce. While tackling all sorts of anti-dumping and countervailing duty cases, he runs a blog that covers what it says on the tin: US China Trade War And if you ask him about the fast-escalating case involving China’s ZTE Corp, Bill will offer you one word: Hòumén (back door or 后门 in simplified Chinese.
China, capital outflow and that over-reporting of imports problem
While, sometimes, moments of unique creativity from those trying to get money out of China come out from behind the curtain to take a bow — losing a lawsuit on purpose and ants moving house, for example — the really large flows outwards have remained pretty opaque. Less opaque now though. Both Christopher Balding and Deutsche’s chief China economist Zhiwei Zhang have taken a long hard look at how capital is flying out of China, despite capital controls which shouldn’t be sniffed at… but clearly are to a large extent. tl;dr: It’s the over-reporting imports that we should blame.
China and traditional industrialisation-led development: the world was not enough
Earlier this month at the annual meetings of the American Economic Association in San Francisco, Justin Yifu Lin argued that China’s growth slowdown has been mainly the result of external and cyclical factors rather than structural transformation. His case rests on the idea that other East Asian and emerging-market economies had also decelerated in recent years, some of which — Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan — do not have the same structural problems that are thought to plague China’s economy. Furthermore, Brazil’s decline has been much sharper than China’s, while India in 2012 also slowed dramatically before rebounding; China can rebound too.
China’s crude oil price exposure
We don’t think of China as an oil producer. And yet, it very much is. China’s oil production in 2014 amounted to about 4.2 mbpd in 2014, according to BP statistics — equal to that of Canada’s production at 4.2 mbpd in 2014 and nearly double that of Nigeria’s at 2.4 mbpd. Then, of course, there’s the mark-to-market value of China’s strategic petroleum reserve, which the country has been building up for years. We don’t know the actual size of the SPR because the numbers are not public, but oil experts say it stands close to 100m barrels, with a sizeable portion of the reserve built up during the $80-$100 per barrel price era.
What are Chinese capital controls really? – Part 1
To understand what happened in China this week we think the best financial analogy for China’s management of its economy and its external capital account is this: think of it as a giant money market fund. So when the currency was officially devalued three times, it was equivalent to the Great China Money Market (GCMM) fund “breaking the buck”, a rare event when presumed safe investments turn out to not be so safe as thought. We’re going to explain what that means in two posts, the first of which is the extended history of China’s economic management needed to realise how the world got to this point in the first place.
This one time, at band camp, the PBOC did this thing
China weakened the renminbi fixing by 1.86 per cent overnight, an unexpected move followed by the biggest one-day change in the value of the renminbi since the country abandoned its dollar peg for a managed trading band. There are two schools of thought on this: Either balance of payment problems are forcing China’s hand, or the move is just another step in the slow and benign process of capital liberalisation. On the first, well hey, they would depreciate in the current environment wouldn’t they? Exports are weak, the economy is sputtering, and the stock market can’t stay up without the state introducing a ban on it going down. Move to a free-floating currency system? Meh. This is just another desperate devaluation story in the style of Nigeria, Russia before them and even peg busting Saudi Arabia on the back of a hard-currency drought in the offshore FX market. (FT Alphaville has predicted this for like ages, yeah?).
A Goldman proxy for (stumbling) Chinese growth
Quite obviously, not many people take China’s own statistics at face value. Also quite obviously, China is a hard economy to accurately measure anyway. It’s really quite big and its pace of change has made grasping any bit of it for very long more than difficult.
China depreciation risk: You do the math
With an unspoken currency war supposedly upon us and a cry for China to join in — according to BofAML the market is pricing about a 30 per cent probability of a 10 per cent devaluation of the CNY this year while insistent market forces push the yuan down anyway — we thought a lopsided CNY depreciation pro and con list from Nomura might be helpful: Pros 1. Makes exports more competitive, helping to boost growth. 2. Raises the cost of imports, helping to reduce the risk of CPI deflation. Cons
The risks of deflation in China
Or the risk of “lethal damage” if you’re into that sort of thing. As said before, we’ve had 34 months and counting of negative PPI inflation in China with CPI at best lacklustre — coming in at 1.5 per cent in December. The risk is that, in a country charmingly wrapped in debt based uncertainty, we get outright deflation.
More on the US-China bilateral trade balance
As a brief follow-up to yesterday’s post on the impact of US trade with China on US employment and incomes, we thought it would be useful to visualize a few interesting facts about the evolution of the bilateral trade balance over time. First, look at how the deficit in the trade of goods swamps the modest surplus in the trade of services. Whilst the data on services are annual and stop in 2012, the general picture would probably not look much different even if it were more up to date: